President Obama is now threatened by a similar toxic mix. The disastrous rollout of his health care law not only threatens the rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration's botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.

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First of all, nobody's "raising" those questions except opportunistic yahoos on the Republican side and -- as we shall see -- career apparatchiks formerly in the employ of C-Plus Augustus, many of whom have spent the past five years trying to pretend that they weren't part of the worst presidency ever.

For the first time in Mr. Obama's presidency, surveys suggest that his reserve of good will among the public is running dry. Two polls in recent weeks have reported that a majority of Americans no longer trust the president or believe that he is being honest with them. "When you start losing the trust and confidence, not only of Congress, but the American people, that makes it even more difficult," said Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia. "You can work yourself out. But you have to be sincere, and you have to be honest."

Oh, shut the fk up, Gomer. You want to be Joe Lieberman in duck waders, do it on your own time. The first putative Democrat quoted in the piece is a guy who represents a statewith five electoral votes, but with real unemployment nudging 20 percent and 91,000 people uninsured, who thought it was funny to cut a commercial where he shoots a Democratic climate-change bill.

Republicans readily made the Hurricane Katrina comparison. "The echoes to the fall of 2005 are really eerie," said Peter D. Feaver, a top national security official in Mr. Bush's second term. "Katrina, which is shorthand for bungled administration policy, matches to the rollout of the website." Looking back, he said, "we can see that some of the things that we hoped were temporary or just blips turned out to be more systemic from a political sense. It's a fair question of whether that's happening to President Obama."

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No, actually, it's not. When you all cocked up the response to Hurricane Katrina, thousands and thousands of people died unnecessarily. When you all went out of your way to dismantle FEMA, which had been one of the crown jewels of the previous administration, and then handed the remnants over to the failed CEO of a luxury show-horse organization, thousands and thousands of people actually died. They were not inconvenienced for a spell by a botch of a website. They were really, most sincerely dead.

Nevertheless, according to the folks at Josh's place, this is going to be the talking-point du jour for a while. DHAT opened on Morning Squint today, too. Cute little Nicolle Wallace. Remember how that darling Sarah Paulson played her in the Game Change movie? That was so adorbs. MSNBC just loves her, now that she's not lying on behalf of the worst president ever. Except that, like most of them, she's rather a ghoul.

"There are moments in a presidency where everything is different afterward and I believe this is that moment," former Bush communications adviser Nicolle Wallace said Friday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "For us, it was Hurricane Katrina because while public support had been dropping for the war in Iraq, after Katrina, after many members of the public and every member of the Democratic Party viewed us as incompetent and it transcended to everything else we did.."You know, you can't look in a crystal ball but I believe this is a moment after which everything will be different for the President," Wallace added. "And if you look at the problems he's facing in the world, with Iran and other issues, he's going to miss his credibility very much."

(Here is something the darling Ms. Wallace failed to mention. At the time that people were drowning in the Ninth Ward, or suffocating to death in their attics while C-Plus Augustus twiddled his thumbs, a lot of the White House staff who might have been working the problem were off in Greece, celebrating the secure tying-up of Mark Wallace to...the former Nicolle Devenish! So the ouzo flowed while people in New Orleans were begging for water. Isn't our old friend Clio, Muse Of History -- also known by her Marvel superhero name, The Proclaimer (!) -- quite the prankster.)

Hundreds of thousands of people have died -- and are still dying in Iraq -- because your bosses lied us into a war and then screwed it up beyond all repair. And, as I may have mentioned, thousands and thousands of people died in New Orleans because your bosses had a fundamental contempt for the notion that government exists to protect a viable political commonwealth for us all. You didn't lose your credibility because Democrats viewed you as incompetent. You lost your credibility because you demonstrated, over and over again, a monstrous ignorance that got hundreds of thousands of people killed. If you want to compare the current situation to any of your multifarious other screw-ups, and to do so with a modicum of human decency, you might compare it to how you passed Medicare Part D with no earthly idea how we would pay for it. But that would require you actually to care about the people in New Orleans who, you know, died. You didn't care about them then. You don't care about them now. You're digging up corpses and using them as a political truncheons. Decent people should spit when you pass by.

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